Ownership that is named
Who decides what, on paper, so a deal does not wait for one calendar. It is the change that frees the founder to work on the commercial model instead of in it.
Early growth
Revenue comes in, but only through the people who built it.
Deals close for reasons you can name, and founder-led sales now has to become a first sales team. No deal yet closes without the founder in it, and that gap is paid for every month.
The transition
One person is the whole system.
The first sales hire has been in the company for five months and has closed two deals. Both were ones the founder opened, qualified and priced before handing over the final call. Asked how a good lead is recognised, the new hire describes what the founder seems to do, because nothing anywhere says what the founder does. Three inbound leads from last month are still waiting for a reply, because the founder's calendar was full.
The model is real. Every path to it runs through one person, and what that person knows lives in conversations, not in anything a second person could test or take over. The cost is everything that did not happen: the reply not sent, the hire not made, the quarter the founder spent closing instead of building.
Signs you are here
Every sign points to the same person.
- One person carries the selling, and everyone else who touches revenue goes through them
- A deal the founder has not touched does not move
- Deal notes, where they exist, live in conversations rather than in the CRM
- The record of deals won and lost is whatever that person remembers
- Pricing decisions so far have been made deal by deal, by the same person
- Referral and inbound sources depend on that person's own relationships
Count how many of these are true, then count how many deals this quarter closed without the founder on the call.
By function
Six seats, five of them still empty.
The first hires arrive one seat at a time, and each inherits what the founder never wrote down. Where the leak shows depends on which seat was filled first.
What the next stage demands
Named owners, in place of one person's judgement.
Everything going through one person is efficient until it is the bottleneck. The next stage asks for the pattern to leave that person's head.
The pattern made teachable
What works has to be written as something you can teach rather than shown deal by deal. Otherwise the second hire relearns it from scratch, and ramp is paid for twice.
A first handoff, designed
The moment work passes between two people, what has to pass with it needs spelling out. Informal handoffs survive while everyone is in the same conversation and fail once they are not.
Evidence that is not memory
The deal log, the lost reasons and the reply times, kept where a second person can read them. That is the baseline the first hire's ramp will be measured against, and the first record a leak can be priced from.
The evidence
What the first hires cost, in four numbers.
Four published figures for companies between $1M and $5M ARR, and for the under-$25M band that contains them. Each is a number the first hires move before anyone has written down what they were hired to repeat.
- 01
$10,000
Cost per opportunity reported by companies under $25M ARR in 2025, from $5,500 in 2024, the largest rise of any band. The first people hired to generate pipeline instead of the founder are paid before they generate it.
ICONIQ, The State of Go-to-Market in 2025, survey of GTM executives, n=36 companies under $25M ARR, June 2025
- 02
23%
SQL to closed-won conversion at companies under $25M ARR in 2025, down from 29% in 2024. A lead the founder used to close is now closed by someone who learned the pitch by watching, and the drop lands here first.
ICONIQ, The State of Go-to-Market in 2025, survey of GTM executives 2023 to 2025, June 2025
- 03
$70,000
Median ARR per employee at $1M-$5M ARR, $50,000 at the 25th percentile and $114,204 at the 75th. Each hire made before the model is written down is a bet that this figure holds while the founder teaches it one deal at a time.
Benchmarkit, 2025 B2B SaaS Performance Metrics Benchmarks, calendar 2024 data, N=174
- 04
1.2
Median burn multiple at $1M-$5M ARR, the lowest of any band below $20M, while the 75th percentile still burns $2.60 for every $1 of net new ARR. The distance between those two companies is what the first commercial hires did with the founder's model.
Benchmarkit, 2025 B2B SaaS Performance Metrics Benchmarks, calendar 2024 data, N=130
The usual entry at this stage
It lives in one or two heads. Build writes it down.
Build
€36,000 flat · scope agreed before work begins · comes before measurement
For a model that works and exists only in the founder's head: who the buyer is, how a lead is judged, how a price is set, written down and run by someone else, before the next hire has to learn it by watching.
Book a strategy callDetails →Not sure it is the right one? Compare all five →
FAQ
Before you assume it is too early.
With one or two people selling, is there enough to write down?
If deals close for the same reasons, there is: the model exists, it just exists in one head. If each deal still closes for its own reason, you are earlier than this page: pre-PMF, where the pattern is still being found.
Why Build rather than a Diagnosis at this stage?
A Diagnosis reads a system against the records it leaves, and here the record is one person's memory. Build is the step before that: the model written down and run by a second person on live deals, so a quota is built on a handoff somebody has described rather than on one nobody has. It is cheaper to write the gap down before the first hire than to carry it into a team of six.
If the founder is the only one who knows how it works, where does Build start?
With the founder, and with whatever the last ten deals left behind. The working sessions go after what exists nowhere else in the company: why the last three deals were won, what the founder listens for in a first call, and what a lost deal looked like a week before it was lost. Each answer ends up with a name against it.
Does Build put a euro figure on what the bottleneck costs?
No. A euro figure needs a quarter of records to price from, and at this stage nothing has been kept long enough to price from. Build leaves that quarter behind it: the written model, run by someone other than the founder, with its deals, replies and lost reasons kept. What still leaks after that can be priced by a Diagnosis, from a record that now exists.
Get started
What runs through one person can be written down.
Thirty minutes on how a deal moves today and how much of it waits on one or two people. If there is nothing to write down yet, the call is where you hear it.